Health Professions and Academia

John Paul Sánchez MD, MPHExecutive Associate Vice ChancellorHealth Sciences Center, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), UNMInterim Executive Diversity OfficerProfessor with Tenure & Vice Chair DEI, Emergency MedicineUniversity of New Mexico School of Medicine (UNM SOM)President, National Center for Pre-Faculty Development and BNGAP Inc. Albuquerque, NMUSA
Nicholas Brutus BAMedical Student, Albany Medical CollegeCoordinator, BNGAP Inc.Albany, NYUSA
Bios:
John Paul Sánchez MD, MPH has worked extensively to promote diversity and inclusion in the health professions academic workforces. He is the Co-Founder/President of Building the Next Generation of Academic Physician (BNGAP). Over the past 11 years, BNGAP has become nationally recognized for developing the concept of pre-faculty development and has collaborated with 60+ academic health centers to educate trainees, faculty, and senior administrators on how to develop the upstream pipeline of diverse learners to become future faculty and senior academic leaders. Dr. Sánchez is also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Academic Medicine and is Associate Editor of MedEdPORTAL (overseeing the Diversity, Inclusion and Health Equity Collection). He is Executive Director of the Latino Medical Student Association Inc., the largest Latino medical student association in the country with 140+ chapters at allopathic and osteopathic medical schools across the country. Since joining the Health Sciences Center (HSC) at the University of New Mexico he has been selected for numerous leadership positions including as Executive Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), whereby he supports ten HSC entities (four graduate schools - medicine, pharmacy, nursing,and population-health; three hospitals; and three centers) in planning, organizing, and aligning DEI activities. He has published 52 peer reviewed publications, 6 book chapters, and served as Editor for a book by Springer Publishing entitled Succeeding in Academic Medicine: A Roadmap for Diverse Medical Students and Residents. He received his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completed his residency training at Jacobi/Montefiore, and is Board Certified in Emergency Medicine. He completed a Masters of Public Health, with a concentration in the epidemiology of infectious diseases, from the Yale School of Public Health. He is of Puerto Rican ancestry, gay-identified and was raised in the Bronx.

Nicholas Brutus is a medical student at Albany Medical College who serves as the National Coordinator of Building the Next Generation of Academic Physicians (BNGAP) and is an aspiring academic physician. Since entering medical school, he continues to engage in diversity lead initiatives with the aim to increase representation within medical schools and the academic workforce. Nicholas has undertaken several leadership positions to promote inclusion of marginalized populations in medicine since entering medical school, including being elected as the Vice-President of Student Council for the 2020-2021 school year overseeing the student curriculum review committee, and he served as Chair on the Underrepresented Student Alliance (USA). Notably, Nicholas was selected as the President of the Albany Medical College's BNGAP Chapter for the 2021-2022 school year. As the National Coordinator of BNGAP, he oversees BNGAP student-led chapters across the nation and is involved in implementing and designing conferences to guide diverse learners to a potential career in academia. Nicholas hopes to embody the BNGAP mission of working to improve diversity in academic medicine and hopes to encourage those with the same passion to excel on their journey. Before medical school, Nicholas worked full-time for 2+ years in a medical device lab as a Quality Control Team Leader where he worked to improve infectious disease detection through in-vitro diagnostics. He helped in the development and improvement of rapid detection test kits for pathogens including SARS-CoV-2, HIV1/HIV2, Syphilis, Zika, among others. Particularly, Nicholas was a part of the quality research team that was granted one of the first Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on a novel rapid COVID IgG/IgM antibody test kit in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. He received his undergraduate degree from the City University of New York, Hunter College. He is also a proud son of Haitian and Jamaican immigrants born and raised in Long Island, New York.